Thursday, June 9, 2016

So with the baking of #419
Cobb’s Bath Buns I’ve completed
the Bread
section of the Teatime
chapter, and it has been a mixed bag. Looking back over the posts, very
few have stuck in my mind; in fact I don’t even remember cooking some of them!
I have no recollection of #81
Northumbrian Wholemeal Scones, for
example. What is strange is that I seem to score the recipes quite highly. I
think it was just the novelty of baking bread creating bias; for the first time
my house was being filled with the smell of freshly-baked bread, and I was
getting to taste real bread made with fresh yeast. Even if it was a slightly
stodgy, under kneaded doorstop.

The totally forgettable Wholemeal Scones

Jane doesn’t give much advice to the total
novice and assumes we have an idea of the bread-making process. When she does
give advice, it is wrong; for #53
Electric Dough Hook Bread, she
advises us to mix the dough only briefly. This does not create a good, fluffy
loaf, though I was impressed at the time.

Electric Dough Hook Bread

However, it is Jane’s writing that provides
such detail about the history of the recipes, one cannot resist getting
interested, so I bought Elizabeth David’s tome, English Bread & Yeast Cookery, which again, got me hooked even
more so. After baking many of her recipes, I was still finding the bread I was
making not quite up to scratch. It was simply practise that got me there –
trial and error, and getting used to the feel of dough that had been kneaded
sufficiently to produce a good, light loaf. The penny dropped for me whilst I
was living in Saint Louis. Only then, did I realise that some of the recipes
work very well, but others really do not.

Now you may think I am being critical –
perhaps over critical – of my food goddess, but over and above what I think of
the recipes within this part of the book, the end result is a chap who can now
bake bread, knows what good bread is, and who will never, ever, buy a
plastic-wrapped Chorleywood supermarket loaf ever again. Surely this is the
point?

Wiltshire Lardy Cake

Here’s the full list of recipes as they
appear in the book with their scores. The Bread recipes averaged out with a mean
score of 6.9.